Pros

Multi-room audio with flexible stereo and surround configurations.
Powerful sound for its size.
Works with Alexa voice control (with support for Google Assistant to come).

Cons

Sound can distort at top volumes.
No Bluetooth or wired audio connections.

Bottom Line

The Sonos One is a versatile wireless speaker with excellent sound quality, support for multi-room audio, and Amazon Alexa voice control.

18 Oct 2017Will Greenwald

While Amazon's Alexa was once available only on Echo devices and Google Assistant was limited to certain Android phones, the popular voice assistants are popping up everywhere now. The Sonos One is one such place you'll find them both. The $199 wireless speaker is effectively the same as the Sonos Play:1, with the added benefit of a microphone array that lets you use Alexa just like it was an Echo. If that isn't enough, Google Assistant is also heading to the One in the future, making it one of the first platform-agnostic voice assistant speakers. It also sounds excellent, and earns our Editors' Choice for its performance and versatility.

Design

At a glance, the One could be easily mistaken for the Play:1. It shares the same coffee can-like design, measuring 6.3 by 4.7 by 4.7 inches (HWD) in a squarish near-cylinder. The speaker is available in black or white, with a grille that runs almost the entire way around its sides. The top is a smooth, solid cap that adds almost an inch of height past the grille. The sides of the grille stop on the back, leaving room for a wide, solid strip that holds an Ethernet port and setup button. The power connector plugs into the bottom, in a recess with a channel that lets the cable run out of the back, under the Ethernet port.

While the One shares a similar profile with the Play:1, its physical controls are completely different. Instead of a contoured top panel with mechanical buttons for playback and volume, the One uses a completely flat top panel with touch-sensitive controls. A play/pause icon sits in the middle, flanked by two four-dot icons on either side. These icons are the One's touch controls, letting you play/pause and adjust volume by tapping, or skip tracks by swiping. An indicator light sits above the play/pause icon, with a smaller microphone status light above that. A microphone icon above lets you mute the mic when you don't want a voice assistant listening in.

Multi-Room Audio

Like all other Sonos speakers, the One supports multi-room, whole-home music playback through the Sonos app. While Sonos doesn't use an open system like Google Cast, the company has built the most robust and broadly supported proprietary multi-room music platform on the market.

The Sonos app works with 49 different streaming music services, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Google Play Music, Pandora, SiriusXM, and Spotify. You can also play music locally stored on your smartphone, tablet, or computer (Sonos Controller software is available on Android, iOS, Mac, and PC). That wide support should cover all of your music needs, which helps take the sting out of the One's lack of Bluetooth or any wired audio connections.

Sonos' multi-room system also supports setting up multiple Sonos speakers in the same room, and you can even pair two Ones together as a stereo set. You can also connect two One speakers with a Sonos Playbar or Playbase to serve as surround sound satellites, just like the Play:1.

Alexa

The One's biggest change over the Play:1, and its key selling point compared with other Sonos speakers, is support for voice assistants. At launch, you can connect the One to your Amazon account and use the Alexa voice assistant, letting you treat it like an Echo. Hands-free voice control lets you ask the One to play music or perform any supported Alexa task just by saying "Alexa."

For music, this means easy voice-controlled access to Amazon Music Unlimited and Prime Music, if you subscribe to either service. You can also tell Alexa to tune into almost any streaming internet radio station through TuneIn and iHeartRadio. Spotify access through Alexa is set to be added, but was not enabled when we tested the speaker.

Alexa's informative voice assistant features are also available on the Sonos One. You can ask simple questions about weather, sports, news, general facts, and unit conversions, and the speaker will provide the answer. Third-party Alexa skills are also available, just like on an Echo device, so you can set up anything from language translation to ordering pizza. These skills need to be enabled through the Alexa app, not the speaker itself, but once they're loaded you're good to go.

If you have smart home devices that are compatible with Alexa, you can use the Sonos One to control them with your voice. I was able to turn on, turn off, and dim a Philips Hue White Ambiance bulb using the One with relative ease. Setting these devices up to work with Alexa requires some digging and registration for individual services through the Alexa app, and the process can differ between different smart home systems, but it's the same set of steps you have to go through with any speaker in Amazon's Echo lineup.

While the Sonos One launches with Alexa support, support for Google Assistant is planned for 2018. That should give it the same capabilities as a Google Home speaker.

Audio Performance

The One can get pretty loud for its size, but you shouldn't expect powerful low-end to come out of its small frame. It easily outshines comparably priced voice assistant speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, and stands on its own against its predecessor, the Play:1. Slightly larger speakers can get louder, and some like the JLab Block Party even support multi-room playback, but those alternatives lack any voice assistant support.

The speaker struggled a bit with our bass test track, The Knife's "Silent Shout." At top volumes, the bass synth notes and kick drum hits distorted a bit, causing a bit of crunchiness in the ideally flat, consistent sounds. This is similar to what we heard with the Play:1, and you can get around it by dialing the volume dial slightly. To the One's credit, it produces some appreciable sub-bass rumble.

Yes' "Roundabout" sounds excellent on the Sonos One, showing off the speaker's sound signature. The low-mids and highs are boosted a bit, which gives the electric bass a good amount of punch and presence and lets the texture of the guitar strings really come through. Vocals stand cleanly in the front of the mix, ensuring that every aspect of the dense track gets some of your attention. The high-mids and highs are pushed up perhaps a bit overzealously, which adds some life to the guitar plinks but pushes the lower frequences just slightly further back than they should be.

Speaking of dense mixes and strong high-frequency response, KMFDM's "Ultra" sounds properly energetic on the One. The guitar shredding gets most of the prominence, but the cacophonous industrial bassline stays present, and the hissed and growled vocals come through clearly.

Erasure's "Chains of Love" is represented extremely well here. The drums get plenty of presence, with a good amount of poppy thump typical with an 80s backbeat. The synths and vocals are clear and clean, standing out in the mix without overpowering the drums, letting all of the track's elements come together in ideally mixed synthpop bliss.

Conclusions

The Sonos One is a worthy and superior upgrade to the Play:1 (which, curiously, is still available for the same $199). It has all of the Play:1's excellent features and sound performance, with the added benefit of Alexa and the promise of Google Assistant in the future. And it's head and shoulders above other voice assistant speakers in this price range, like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. The forthcoming Apple HomePod and Google Home Max are larger and presumably more powerful Siri- and Google Assistant-equipped speakers, but they're each about twice the price of the Sonos One. If you just want a small, powerful speaker for easy multi-room audio, the JLab Block Party is a less expensive alternative that uses a Bluetooth mesh system rather than Wi-Fi. In the $200 range, however, the Sonos One is easily the best and most versatile voice assistant speaker available, and our Editors' Choice.

About the Author

Will Greenwald has been covering consumer technology for a decade, and has served on the editorial staffs of CNET.com, Sound & Vision, and Maximum PC. His work and analysis has been seen in GamePro, Tested.com, Geek.com, and several other publications. He currently covers consumer electronics in the PC Labs as the in-house home entertainment expert, reviewing TVs, media hubs, speakers, headphones, and gaming accessories. Will is also an ISF Level II-certified TV calibrator, which ensures the thoroughness and accuracy of all PCMag TV reviews. See Full Bio